StarLink from 1984: Digital Research's Forgotten Multiuser PC Experiment
In 1984, Digital Research Inc. launched StarLink, a hardware and software combo to turn IBM PCs into multiuser systems using Concurrent DOS. Despite offering a cheaper alternative to dedicated minicomputers, the product failed commercially due to high total costs and the inability to run Lotus 1-2-3, the dominant application of the era.
What it could not run was the application that made the IBM PC dominant: Lotus 1-2-3.
- aa-jv
In that era (87/88'ish) I used Quarterdeck Desqview to provide multi-user capabilities on my (then) super-charged 486:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview
It was possible to wire things up so that multiple users could connect to a separate Desqview instance and have their own local user context, albeit an MSDOS one .. it was quite functional as a multi-user system for a few years until I got on minix-list and heard about that little project Linus was working on, then decided to switch ..
I'm pretty sure there's a modern way to do this with a Linux system packed with video cards and multiple USB keyboard/mice accessories .. one of these days it'd be nice to do that, and get things caught up with how it used to be, SGI-wise ..
- healthworker
Along these lines, it would be neat to use Raspberry Pi or something to make a "terminal to HDMI adapter", allowing me to have an unlimited number (tens or even hundreds) of external monitors for my laptop, each running a separate terminal-mode program such as a text editor, htop, Bloomberg, etc.
I often find fully working LCD monitors discarded by people who have no use for them, and could easily collect five or more of them that way if I had a convenient way to "wire them up" to my laptop.
- tristanj
I'm guessing it's called StarLink because the design uses a Star network topology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_network
- natch
In the “the name got reused” section the article missed the Subaru usage of it.
- RajT88
Woah. I've seen this before, boxes lying around in old closets.
I visited my dad at work once, and the setup looked just like this. I couldn't tell you if it was Starlink directly, but I heard that when my sister visited, one of his coworkers did something to mess with my dad's terminal's screen.